Well, tonight’s the night when we finally find out: has the USA elected its first black President? Or are the opinion polls wronger than they’ve been in history? Join us tonight, here on LDV, for our election-nite live-blog, and feel free to contribute your comments as we type.
Don’t forget, you can follow what’s happening when, and what to look out for, by using Lib Dem councillor Joe Taylor‘s indispensable cut-out-n-keep download’n’print guide to the American Elections here.
10.52 pm
[Stephen Tall] Well, as you can see (or not) at the moment, CoverItLive seems to have fallen victim to the mass server overload that seems to be bringing down websites left, right and centre. (Not that I check the ones on the right so much). So, for now, I’m afraid for now we’re reliant on steam-powered Internet live-blogging. Sorry, and all that.
10.56 pm
[Stephen Tall] PoliticsHome is feeding us first exit poll data: 62% of voters named the economy as their top issue in deciding who to vote for; Iraq and terrorism trailed with 10% and 9% respectively. This is a domestic, bread ‘n’ butter election.
11.08 pm
Exit poll – with all the caveats – from Virginia via Talking Points Memo blog: “The early exits we’re seeing out of Virginia suggest a close race with an advantage to Obama. The split of the white vote looks similar to what Jim Webb got in 2006, but with blacks making up a substantially larger percentage of the electorate.”
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8 Comments
Could it be that it’s scheduled to start at 10pm WET?
At the minute I can’t get a connection to CoverItLive.com – can anyone else?
Charlotte, WET is Western European Time (I’ve never heard of it too).
Stephen, at the moment I can login to CIL however it says that you haven’t started it yet.
Yep, I can.
I know naff all about CoverItLive, but I’m very unimpressed by Newsnight’s coverage so far. Jeremy Paxman’s been firing off mistakes – 130 million people are entitled to vote; no, that’s the anticipated turnout… We have the results from just one small town in New Hampshire; no, there are two that vote at midnight and we’ve had them both all day…
Worse is Jeremy Vine’s no doubt extremely expensive touch-screen county breakdown is of no use at all to the viewer. We see pictures of states, in white, split up into an intricate grid of counties and districts. So what? He gestures at them, presses them – often the wrong one, because there are dozens of the things and they’re just blank white – and then shares with us some random demographics from, say, two districts out of fifty. Why that one? How significant is it? We don’t know. It comes across as someone just showing off their software to you, when what you want is to press the buttons yourself.
Next time (sigh), they need to learn the value of shading, which every other political mapmaker online or in the papers can manage. Add colour for population – to say, for example, that the Democrat areas are small, but where a lot of the people live – or for party share of the vote last time, I don’t care, but each would tell us something for a glance. But a blank white grid, like a serious broadsheet fifty years ago… It’s going to be a long night.
Boy is Vine annoying. Again.
Ned, Ive said it before, and I’ll say it again – Bring Back Peter Snow!!!!!
Thanks to the rubbishness that is O2’s internet connection, I alas can’t see our CoveritLive coverage, except 5 messages at a time on my BlackBerry, but it all looks very lively. Spare a thought for me trying to find a news website that’s alive right now, while I call O2 to find out why they’re messing with my mind 🙁